I approached Joseph
Sobran: The National Review Years with trepidation, fearing that the
title might as well have been Joseph Sobran: While on the Reservation. A
Joe Sobran retrospective that ignored his ignominiously engineered departure in
the early 1990s from National Review at the hands of Norman Podhoretz
and the sycophantic William F. Buckley amid accusations of anti-Semitism seemed
rather like telling the story of the Titanic without mentioning the
incident with the iceberg.

The well-deserved
praise in Pat Buchanan's Foreword did nothing to allay my fear, nor did Tom
Bethell's Preface. Fran Griffin published Sobran's monthly newsletter beginning
in 1994; her graceful Introduction mentions only that Sobran "left" National
Review and thereafter "Joe, at last, did not feel constrained by pesky
editors." I still feared the book might be an obsequious attempt to
rehabilitate Sobran posthumously without mention of his supposed offense.

But the first
article in this collection — a December 1975 Sobran piece entitled "My Days
at National Review" — left me in stitches. In a marvelous bit of
mischievousness, the editor, Griffin, leads off with Sobran praising but also
damning Podhoretz's Commentary as "another magazine whose
excellence I toast" though it is "humorless" with a "tone
that is a little too solemn and troubled. … Commentary has always
reasoned intelligently, but so have the men who have done the great mischief of
this century." In the same piece, Sobran says National Review, in
contrast, "was always fun," had "courage in standing its ground
even when the authoritative ideas of the day were against it," and
deflated those who "cooperate to impose an ersatz consensus on the rest of
us." Such irony, when one considers Buckley's later treatment of Sobran
and his ideas. The book thus declares itself not a fawning attempt at
rehabilitation but more a defiant demonstration of what National Review lost
when Sobran was exiled.

In these
collected essays and book reviews, Sobran addresses media bias, liberal biases
and pieties, Elvis ("as na´ve as his own music"), the Rolling Stones
("Stony Rolls: hard to get into, not much flavor"), Woodstock,
Chesterton ("a living challenge to today's reader"), stereotypes,
racism ("What's that?"), censorship, Hugh Hefner ("a man waiting
in line at he world's biggest gangbang … self consciously tasteless"),
liberal Catholics, Jimmy Carter ("Martyr-In-Chief"), Ronald Reagan
("To call him simplistic is simply simplistic."), journalism, and
much more. There's the seemingly obligatory ode to baseball, and, of course, a
large dose of Shakespeare, or this wouldn't be Sobran.

Sobran was
stylish, witty, and often insightful: "The business of the mass media,
whatever good intentions may modify it, is to attract and stimulate mass
reaction. This makes them natural tools of totalitarianism, which has only come
into its own with the electronic age. Even in free countries they are
increasingly given over to advertising and pornography: forms of manipulation
which, whatever their moral value, shouldn't be confused with the habits of
reflection we associate with reading. And as I have said, reading is itself
overrated."

In the eighties
Sobran wrote an essay for Fidelity, the predecessor to Culture Wars;
in a single extraneous sentence he called for the legalization of homosexual
activity. The pesky editors insisted on deletion of the sentence, but,
unconstrained, Sobran insisted on its inclusion, so the essay never ran. There
is no advocacy for the legalization of homosexual activity in these National
Review essays either. Nor does one see much of Sobran's libertarian and
anarchist streaks or the issue that ruptured his relationship with National
Review. Pesky editors constrained him, I suspect. In an Afterword, though,
Ann Coulter addresses the issue directly: "And no, he was not constantly
muttering about Jews."

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